Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

My company have just bought out a competitor. We wan't to dissolve their website and if possible steal some of their link juice.

The site hasn't got any spammy links or 404's so i'm not worried in that department.

What I am not sure about is which of the following is best practice?

a. Redirect every single page (even pages like /?checkout) to a relevant page on our website.

b. Only redirect important pages, category pages, contact pages etc and leave the other pages to 404?

c. Redirect the important pages to a relevant URL and redirect the less important pages to our homepage.

d. Redirect the entire domain to our home page (i assume this isn't a good idea)

e. Don't redirect any of the pages just delete the site.

Hi Sean,

Sorry, I got mixed up when typing - swedish-distributor.co.uk and swedish-supplier.co.uk were meant to be the same domain. Edited the question!

Hi All,

Recently acquired a competitor company. This acquired company is small in size but is the exclusive UK distributor for a gigantic Swedish company. This is the way the current domain structure is divided.

• swedish-supplier.se (Not owned by us - swedish supplier )
• Swedish-supplier.co.uk (owned by us, operating as the swedish supplier in the UK)
• New-acquired-company.com (owned by us)

The supplier doesn't want us to have two websites as they keep getting confused customers. Because of this we have agreed to remove www.swedish-suplier.co.uk and solely sell the product at www.new-aqquired-company.com.

However,  because of the sheer size of the Swedish supplier, a lot of traffic comes through to swedish-supplier.co.uk.

My question is, how can we work together with the supplier to remove this domain and still maintain a good amount of UK traffic?

Should we point swedish-supplier.co.uk back to the suppliers original translated web site and have them pass enquiries onto us or should we point it to our website? & What's the best way to go about it?

Thanks,

Danny

Hi André,

Have you made all the necessary changes in Google Search Console i.e. Change of Address Tool, Sitemap Update, Fetch As Google?

Danny

This happens with all ecommerce platforms.

This is usually due to the categories on your site duplicating your pages.

You may have one product that is available in different colours so two links are being created. For example  www.car.com/new-car

and

www.car.com/new-car=blue might be the exact same page.

Search engines are unsure which page to index from your website and they are very unlikely to show multiple or duplicate product pages within their index.

So, you need to inform search engines which page you wish for them to index.

The best way to solve these issues is to simply go through each error and solve it. You will start to notice a pattern in the duplicate content URLs and redirects. This should speed up the process. You could either add in canonical tags or simply use your robots file to block google crawling particular URL extensions. I have stopped bots from crawling my ecommerce pages that end with the parameter "route=product/search&tag" and "product-id" as these are non SEO friendly URLS that are duplicated versions of my pages.

Make sure that you also remove dead links and remove links that are going to versions of the page you don't want them too.

It's a lengthy process but it needs to be done.

Danny

Kristen is right, before you even think about the SEO implications, think about the user experience. If the navigation changed while you were browsing the chances you would notice are slim. You begin to come confused and if i saw something like that i would assume the website is poorly developed. Adding a sub navigation is the better option, I would use a vertical navigation for the product groups at the side of the site.

No, Not you wouldn't list all countries.

First, Google has its country specific versions, such as Google.co.uk for the UK and Google.ca for Canada. Each of these deliver search results that are more appropriate for users from the relevant country. That doesn't mean that you will only rank on one, but ranking internationally is much more difficult. There is no google.asia so you cant rank well for the whole of Asia unless you are an international super company. You can only rank well for individual countries in asia.

Users in the UK can rank on google.com (us) if the content is internationally recognised, but this is easier said than done.

Your site (siteground.com)

Notice, it offers google alternatives for language and country. It does not rank for en_ASIA or en_EUROPE.

in the same way you would have .co.uk and .es even though they are in the same continent , you would need to create language and country targeted sites in order to use an alternative rel tag for Google to understand it is not duplicate content.

As i said, if you want to avoid duplicate content you can only do so for countries + languages, not continents.

At the moment, you cannot use any tags to geo target continents, only countries. There is no way around this, unless you are serving the website to a particular country or in a different language. This will result in one website being dropped from the index and not being served at all. There isn't any need to serve the .asia site from a different data centre either.

To avoid the duplicate content, you have to serve one of the following

• Same content in a different language
• Same content in a different country
• Different content

You can justify the duplicate content to google using webmaster tools & language/country tags.

Try the speed test again. Speed tests don't usually show the same results every time. Every other time I test my site it reads 89/100 and then when i retest i get 94/100. This can all depend on how quickly the server responds at the time.

Furthermore, there is clearly a lot of work to do before you can even begin to worry about these results

Hi André,

Have you made all the necessary changes in Google Search Console i.e. Change of Address Tool, Sitemap Update, Fetch As Google?

Danny

At the moment, you cannot use any tags to geo target continents, only countries. There is no way around this, unless you are serving the website to a particular country or in a different language. This will result in one website being dropped from the index and not being served at all. There isn't any need to serve the .asia site from a different data centre either.

To avoid the duplicate content, you have to serve one of the following

• Same content in a different language
• Same content in a different country
• Different content

You can justify the duplicate content to google using webmaster tools & language/country tags.

You could use the specific domain names as redirects to the relevant pages if you really want to use them in some way.

The thing is Apple wouldn't use a new domain for one product. Ranking for search term Chair type A isn't going to be any easier at domain chairtypeA.com than it would be at chairtypes.com/chairtypeA

In fact, as EGOL said, having all your links  going to the main domain is going to create a nice high authoritative page that tells Google you sell all types of chairs. Let's say your main domain authority has a domain authority of 30 because it has 20 links or something. Those 20 links are related to both chair type A and chair type B. If you split those into two domains, you are then left with two domains with half the authority. You would then have two less authoritative sites with 10 links each (It's not that literal) thus ranking lower on both sites than you would have originally using the higher authoritative page.

This is the better idea as the chair types combined create a stronger campaign where you can develop more links, more traffic and more trust.

Danny

This is usually spam. The data showing in your Analytics is not real, in fact it is not a bot or a user and will not affect your SEO at all.

The idea of this is that a spammy entry is placed into your google analytics readings to fool you into thinking that the bounces are real. You then follow the link to see what it's about which in turn brings traffic to the spam site.

have a read of this link

https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

This happens with all ecommerce platforms.

This is usually due to the categories on your site duplicating your pages.

You may have one product that is available in different colours so two links are being created. For example  www.car.com/new-car

and

www.car.com/new-car=blue might be the exact same page.

Search engines are unsure which page to index from your website and they are very unlikely to show multiple or duplicate product pages within their index.

So, you need to inform search engines which page you wish for them to index.

The best way to solve these issues is to simply go through each error and solve it. You will start to notice a pattern in the duplicate content URLs and redirects. This should speed up the process. You could either add in canonical tags or simply use your robots file to block google crawling particular URL extensions. I have stopped bots from crawling my ecommerce pages that end with the parameter "route=product/search&tag" and "product-id" as these are non SEO friendly URLS that are duplicated versions of my pages.

Make sure that you also remove dead links and remove links that are going to versions of the page you don't want them too.

It's a lengthy process but it needs to be done.

Danny

Yes, the problem with domain masking is that it creates duplicate content in search engines, particularly Google. Google would see the two domains serving the same content.

Search engines will identify these domains as duplicates and decide to serve one over the other; and most times it’s not always the one you want.

Can i ask the reason you are thinking about a mask?

Danny

Kristen is right, before you even think about the SEO implications, think about the user experience. If the navigation changed while you were browsing the chances you would notice are slim. You begin to come confused and if i saw something like that i would assume the website is poorly developed. Adding a sub navigation is the better option, I would use a vertical navigation for the product groups at the side of the site.

I have tested with the robots tool too. Does seem to be blocked but running a crawl to see what moz brings up.

Try the speed test again. Speed tests don't usually show the same results every time. Every other time I test my site it reads 89/100 and then when i retest i get 94/100. This can all depend on how quickly the server responds at the time.

Furthermore, there is clearly a lot of work to do before you can even begin to worry about these results

301 Redirects are primarily designed for more permanent complicated jobs.

• Expired content
• Multiple versions of homepage
• Change of site

Canonical tags are a better way of telling Google that a query or slash is serving the exact same page content and is just a variation of the URL. Neither if done correctly will have a negative effect on the SEO, however using the canonical tag is far easier and appropriate.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use